Vast World, a work created for The End of the World (Centro Luigi Pecci – Prato), is a hybrid contraption that works as an optical instrument and sound reproduction device at the same time, a “live” environment within which the viewer perceives and is perceived. The artist, building on studies of the precursors of film – the Magic Lantern, the New World, the Kaiserpanorama, the Renaissance darkroom – combines projection mechanisms with the structure of the camera, creating a multiple representation device activated by external ambient light. Inside the Nidoboard® honeycomb cardboard architecture, original monochromatic glass slides hand-painted with watercolors, dating back to the beginning of the last century, are seamlessly projected inside the structure, creating a panoramic scenario in which the viewer is immersed. The audio composition, the result of a collaboration with the production house Recipient.cc, reworks Steve Reich’s Piano Phase (1967), experimenting with the phasing technique and alternated with a poetic text composed of a repertoire of botanical terminology recited in four different languages. The title of the work takes its cue from a Baroque historical moment in which a new garden concept emerged, the idea of the ‘vast world’. A kind of garden in which the whole world is enclosed in a small fence: species and varieties from all over the world and of all sizes, shapes and colors grow mixed together in an almost undisciplined way. A conscious image that migrates from people to people. The perceptual disorientation caused by the sound is amplified by its circular diffusion inside the space and by the architectural structure itself, which transforms into a vibrating sound source. Thus an experiential space out of time comes to life, dominated by a dreamlike narrative, devoid of organized and rational structures, a mise-en-scène of an ideal and preternatural world in which observers are invited to lose themselves.

more info: https://francescobertele.net/progetto/vasto-mondo/